Critical infrastructure protection

Full file : Critical Infrastructure protection / Protection des infrastructures critiques

Critical infrastructure protection (CIP) plays an increasingly central role in the strategies to reduce societal vulnerability and to mitigate the conceived threat from terrorism on both sides of the Atlantic. Simultaneously the practice of CIP questions our theoretical understanding of a range of concepts as it introduces new technologies and new knowledge to the practice of security, not easily caught from the perspective of IR and traditional security studies.

In order to initiate a debate on such crucial issues, the University of Copenhagen, a challenge partner (WP3), organized a workshop last September 12 with both American and European scholars. The main question asked, from both theoretical and empirical perspective, was to know how we can understand the rationalities at play and the effects of these so-called new security practices involving technological tools. Some insights from the workshop are summarized in the following.

Critical infrastructure is usually defined as the infrastructures on which the continued function of society is dependent. This includes sectors as diverse as the electrical grid, trade, transport and communication systems as well as nuclear power plants, the continuity of government, and the Internet. These sectors are accordingly both solid in-place objects and interconnected de-territorialized networks, and argued by government officials increasingly at risk and in need of protection.

The multifaceted character of these infrastructures in turn questions a number of the established categories on which the practice of politics is traditionally based. It destabilizes our relation to space, time and territory, in transcending the distinction between inside and outside and thus reconfiguring the conditions of possibility for the exercise of sovereign authority. The politics of CIP, and the construction of the threat they are meant to counter, effectively make a powerful discursive connection combining everyday life inside the ‘sacred homeland’ with unknown fears and anxieties from terror and new digital technologies.

In the area of CIP, the security practices of the state are moved inside sovereign space, inside the social body. Much of what is deemed critical infrastructure is part of society itself, owned and operated by private actors. The protective efforts of the state - taking place as they are on the inside - invariably integrate the private owners in these new practices making them security actors empowered vis-à-vis the rest of society, but disciplined by the security policies of the state. Security is privatized while the private is securitized. This blurring of the distinction between the state and the private sector means that security practices moves out into society and penetrates public space, both in its actual and potential aspects.

This means that the traditional and normal conditions for day to day politics are intermingled with the exceptional dynamics of national security leading to the introduction of new socio-spatial technologies of control. In close relation to these technologically driven security policies is a focus on worst case scenarios. This dynamic inevitably works with the widening of the policies of CIP, progressively applied to additional spaces and sectors of societies and justified by the necessity to minimize the large range of risks the very same society is said to be incurring.

These points on the issue of CIP themselves raise a range of questions. The role of the network, the individual and the state are all at play. Basically, how is the network of critical infrastructures discerned from the society or the state? How are political boundaries maintained or created, capable of controlling de-territorialized and virtual networks? What is the role of the individual, what are the consequences of taking the human subject out of the equation as is the case in the practice of CIP? In sum, how do the transformations accounted for above change the conditions for exercising political power?

Such questions are crucial for the reflective approach one must apply when confronting both the development of the practice of CIP as well as developing a critical stance on these issues. In Europe (both at the European and national levels) as well as in the United-States, new national strategies have been developed and new tools are progressively being set up, which all participate to the large reconfiguration of the political strategies at play. On both sides of the Atlantic new strategies, white papers etc are being produced [see, among others, the National Plan for Information Systems Protection(2000), the National Strategy for the Physical Protection of Critical Infrastructures and Key Assets or the National Security Strategy to Secure Cyberspace (both issued in 2003) in the United-States; the European Commission Communication to the European Parliament on Critical Infrastructure Protection in the Fight Against Terrorism (2004) and the Green Paper on Critical Infrastructures (11.2005) at the European Level; the Chantier sur la lutte contre la cybercriminalité (Proposal for the fight against terrorism, 2005) in France; and the proposals of the National Infrastructure Security Co-ordination Centre in UK]. All these texts start from the crucial role of Critical Infrastructures in western societies, arguing then of the necessity to prioritize the protection of these CI vis á vis other objects, as they increasingly condition the continuity of our everyday life.

The detailed analysis of these documents reveals interesting similarities between Europe (European Level) and the United-Sates - especially in the way CIs are presented in relation to the fight against terrorism. Both actors point insistently to the Informational aspect and the importance of coordination. But the analysis also points out differences in the approaches. The American is now clearly based on a strategical perspective, formalized in two National Strategy Documents, which set up a certain number of strategic objectives and organizes the coordination of various departments and agencies (from the military apparatus to the Environmental Protection Agency and the FBI) through the Department of Homeland Security. The European approach is more recent and remains to a large degree limited to consultation-mechanisms between member states (cf. Green Paper on Criticzal Infrastructure). Furthermore, it puts less emphasis on global and strategic aspects of CIP, instead the EU approach conceptualize CIP more as a matter of home affairs and cyber-criminality (see also the European Convention on Cybercrime or the French «Proposals for the fight against cybercriminality»). The existence of these two perspectives, not necessarily exclusive one from the other, should incite us to analyse more in detail the agencies actually dealing with CIP. Thus, in a wider perpective focus our aim at analysing the focus on CIP in relation to the issues of the historical transformation of the state and the transformation of its surveillance and coercive prerogatives.

List of the Partners and workpackages working on the issue of CIP : Partner 2 and 5

Partner 2 Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, France

Web: http://www.sciences-po.fr

Established in 1945, the Fondation Nationale des Sciences Po (FNSP) has ever since played a prominent role as one of the leading research institutions in France in the field of social sciences.

In quantitative terms the research activities at the FNSP represent: 8 research centres, five of which are operated within the CNRS national research framework and a research staff of about 250 persons, including permanent researchers, part-time scholars and junior fellows, most of which are also members of the faculty at the FNSP’s teaching component, the Institute d’Etudes Politiques (I.E.P.) de Paris, further, a doctoral school offering 7 graduate programmes in political science, history, economics and sociology. The average number of enrolled PhD students is about 500 per year.

The common aims of the FNSP research centers are to analyse and explain political, economic and social life in the contemporary world, using a comparative approach. In particular, research at the FNSP focuses on two main sets of issues: the causes, actors, processes and effects of globalisation on economics, politics and culture and social behaviour, and crises and new forms of social linkages emerging in the developed countries, particularly in Europe.

WP 2 : Securatization beyond borders : Exceptionalism inside the EU and impact on policing beyond borders

Partner 5 University of Copenhagen, Denmark

Web: http://www.polsci.ku.dk

The Department of Political Science at the University of Copenhagen has about 1750 students, 30 researchers, and a variable number of research scholars. It was established in 1965. Although organised around the familiar sections comparative politics, international politics and public administration, the department has a broad profile trying to combine the political, economic and sociological disciplines in the study of the political processes of society. Among its areas of particular strength are new developments within institutional analysis in political science, democratic theory, EU research (especially the relationship between integration and security), the effects of European integration on national political institutions, and the so-called Copenhagen School within security studies.

WP 3 : Securitization, Technology and the Transformation of Warfare

Related issues : link toward File on biometry.

Full file : Critical Infrastructure protection / Protection des infrastructures critiques